For most people nowadays, colonialism is part of a bygone era. The majority of the world’s population has no first-hand experience of it, and many cannot imagine what it means to live under total foreign control. Today we have museums of colonialism, where people can go to learn about how this form of rule affected natives’ freedoms to live, to move, to speak, to work, and even to die peacefully. We live (supposedly) in a postcolonial world, and museums of colonialism serve to transport visitors back to a cruel era, granting them a glimpse of the damage this type of governance wrought on native communities.
What if, however, there were an actual place in our world today where colonialism and post-colonialism co-existed? Herein lies the sad, almost incomprehensible Palestinian contribution to the museum industry. If museums of colonialism reimagine the past in a modern setting, Palestine is both past and present – a colonial and postcolonial reality. In Palestine, there is no need to create a museum of colonialism: the whole country functions as such.
At any museum, you can expect to be able to explore different sections on different themes. The same holds true in Palestine – it has various sections, each displaying a different layer of colonialism. There is the West Bank, where you can see illegal Israeli settlements, expropriated land, a separation wall, and a physically controlled population. Then there is Gaza, where open-air museum meets open-air prison, as two million Palestinians have been living under an Israeli blockade for more than 15 years. And if you are more into surveying a surreal case of colonialism, then head to Israel proper and find out how Palestinians who stayed in historic Palestine after the foundation of Israel live. There, you will learn about stolen houses, demolished villages, second-class citizens, and institutionalised racism.
Open-air museums seek to give visitors a direct experience of what it was like to live in the past. When I tell foreign friends that settler-only roads surround my tiny village, Burin, located a few kilometres southwest of Nablus in the West Bank, they respond with a disbelieving gasp. For many, it is inconceivable to imagine colonial-era conditions in our time, and yet they have been the status quo in Palestine for decades. People who would like to learn about colonialism need look no further than Palestine. It is colonialism incarnate.